Course document
Laboratory manual
The manual is the authoritative document for this laboratory. It contains the full theory for each experiment, the derivations behind every analysis you are asked to do, the error-analysis conventions used throughout, and a complete statement of the physical models the simulated apparatus obeys — including their limitations.
Contents
- Front matter, aims and assessment
- Conduct of the laboratory and how to keep a notebook
- Measurement, uncertainty and the treatment of data
- Fitting, graphs and the reporting of results
- The physical models used by the simulated apparatus
- Experiment 1: The Zeroth Law and the Ideal-Gas Temperature Scale
- Experiment 2: The First Law: Work, Heat and the Ratio of Heat Capacities
- Experiment 3: Calorimetry: Heat Capacity, Latent Heat and Entropy Change
- Experiment 4: The Second Law: Heat Engines, the Carnot Cycle and Efficiency
- Experiment 5: Entropy, Irreversibility and the Principle of Increasing Entropy
- Experiment 6: Thermodynamic Potentials, the Gibbs Function and the Clausius-Clapeyron Equation
- Experiment 7: The Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution of Molecular Speeds
- Experiment 8: Heat Capacity of Solids: the Einstein and Debye Theories, and the Third Law
- Experiment 9: Blackbody Radiation and Bose-Einstein Statistics
- Experiment 10: Fermi-Dirac Statistics: Thermionic Emission from a Metal
- Experiment 11: Joule-Thomson Expansion and the Maxwell Relations
- Physical constants and material data
- Answers to selected questions
Building the manual from source
The LaTeX source lives in manual/. With a TeX Live installation available, run:
cd manual && make
This runs latexmk twice to resolve cross-references and copies the result into public/, where this page picks it up.